The Harold Lamb Megapack

by Harold Lamb

  Gian grunted and flung up both arms, reeled in the saddle and tumbled to the ground. But Michael had not seen the thing that struck him down.

  “Habet!” a shrill voice chanted. “Goliath is dead! Stand aside, Cousin Michael, and let the other devil have his due.”

  By now Michael was aware of Bembo on his mule-ass, waving something about his head.

  “Nay,” the Breton growled; “this is my affair.”

  The fall of Gian had brought a scowl to Rudolfo’s olive face. He pressed Michael desperately, cursing under his breath. The two scimitars clashed and the helmet was struck from the Breton’s head. Rudolfo, panting, exerted every effort to follow up his success and reach his enemy’s bare skull. Michael was taunting him softly.

  As Rudolfo’s blow fell Michael sprang forward dropping his sword. The other’s scimitar passed over his shoulder and Michael’s powerful left hand caught the other’s wrist, pinning it to his side.

  At this the Italian grinned maliciously, for, with his enemy’s left hand occupied, he fancied that Michael was defenseless. So Rudolfo gripped Michael’s throat, bending his head back viciously with his free hand.

  Somewhat he wondered at Michael’s passivity, not knowing that the Breton’s right hand, useful once more, thanks to long and patient practice, was feeling in his own girdle for the dagger Rudolfo carried.

  Michael’s searching fingers freed the dagger and plunged it into the other’s throat, over the mail.

  Sword in hand, Rudolfo swayed on his feet, choked and wheeled about as if to run. His knees sank under him and he blundered against a rock, falling heavily upon his back. Both his hands gripped the hilt of the dagger, strained at it and were still.

  Bembo, having dismounted, bent over the condottiere and ripped off the bulging pouch that was tied to the dead man’s waist. Michael saw for the first time that the jester held a long sling, made of thin strips of leather, a stone ready in the pocket. Catching his glance, the jester laughed.

  “My weapon,” he said proudly. “Gian’s thick head was cracked like a hen’s egg. Gian’s thick purse was full of gold trinkets plundered, methinks, from the slain. So I would fain crack open his master’s nest-egg—”

  From Rudolfo’s pouch a stream of Turkish gold bezants poured forth.

  “Consummatum est,” murmured Bembo. “It is finished. Gian’s spoil will pay me for saving your life, coz. These belong to you.”

  As Michael shook his head, the jester, nothing loath, poured the coins into his goatskin, after emptying out the remaining stones.

  Breathing deeply from his effort, Michael gazed around at the shadows of the ravine and listened in vain for the war-cry of the Tatars.

  “You will not hear it, coz,” remarked Bembo. “What is left of the grandees is flying toward Angora with worthy Mirza Rustem in hot pursuit. The victory is ours, as I prayed San Marco it should be.

  He tied up the sack and surveyed Rudolfo philosophically.

  “Cousin Michael,” he declared thoughtfully, “you are a wise man. In Venice did you assert that a man follows his bent. And here is Rudolfo, a noble seller of himself, a condottiere to the king’s taste. He sold himself to Genoa, then Venice, then back to himself again. Last night he traded him to the sultan, and now methinks he has gone to purgatory to sell his soul to the devil.”

  Out on the plain of Angora the sun had set over the red mist and the red dust where the bodies of fifty thousand men lay motionless.

  It was night when Michael and his follower sought Mirza Rustem and Tamerlane in the town of Angora. They knew that where the khan was, the sultan would be. Men had told them that Bayezid had been taken before he could leave the field and that a hundred of his grandees had died around him before he could be taken.

  Torches borne by the Tatars and the glare of building tents revealed to Michael a strange sight. Tamerlane sat his horse at the entrance to the pleasure lake of the palace. Mirza Rustem in bloodied armor and the scarred, dust-coated noyans attended him.

  Huddled groups of women and slaves stared in a kind of fascination at what stood before the old Tatar. Pushing past the onlookers to the side of Mirza Rustem, Michael saw the great bulk of Bayezid kneeling in front of Tamerlane’s horse.

  The sultan wore his embroidered cap with the blood-colored ruby, and his tunic of cloth-of-gold. His head swayed on his shoulders and his eyes were half closed. His glance went from one to another of the noyans and finally rested on Michael.

  The black eyes of the defeated monarch widened as he recognized the Christian who had been his slave. His lips twisted as he half-made a gesture of appeal, and then drew back before the passionless scrutiny of the Tatars.

  Michael folded his arms and waited, to hear Tamerlane’s word that would speak the fate of the man who was called the Thunderbolt.

  “Live—if you can,” said the old Conqueror gruffly.

  He signed to a group of his followers who brought out a cage that had held one of Tamerlane’s leopards.

  In this cage Bayezid was placed and the door locked. He could no longer look into the eyes of the watchers as he was picked up, with his prison, and carried through the flame-ridden streets of Angora.

  Somewhere in the huddle of captives a woman screamed and the other Moslems took up the wail of lament.

  * * * *

  News of what had come to pass in Asia spread to the world of Christendom. The wave of Ottoman invasion had been broken. In his marble palace standing over the dark waters of the Golden Gate, the Byzantine Emperor held revelry to celebrate the delivery of Constantinople.

  The crusaders of Saint John took new heart; the pilgrim galleys that sailed from Venice were filled with new voyagers to the Holy Land. Te Deum was sung in the cathedrals of France. But no mention reached France of the share in the victory of Angora that belonged to an obscure voyager of Brittany. Nor did the mother of Michael Bearn hear the name of her son in the mouths of pilgrims.

  The Maritime Council of Venice planned new inroads into the field of Oriental trade, and wrote off the moneys advanced to Signor Clavijo and his party as a total loss. In fact it was recorded in the annals of the council that Clavijo and all those with him were lost.

  This, however, was not the case. Clavijo lived—outside the knowledge of the council that he dreaded—in Spain and wrote a book of his travels that was filled with most marvelous tales.

  And Tamerlane rewarded Michael Bearn. The Tatar monarch bestowed on him a khanate in northern Persia—Fars, with its palace and riches.

  But Michael did not accept it for himself, giving it, instead, to a friend. He turned his back on the East to seek a galley bound for the Brittany he had not seen for ten years and the castle where his mother waited.

  So it happened that the bailios of Contarini and the Maritime Council of the Signory of Venice reported a curious thing.

  In the heart of Tatary, they said, sometimes called the land of Gog and Magog, not far from the Salt Sea, there was a fine palace in fair groves of date and cypress trees.

  The ruler of this palace of Fars was a weird man, with emerald rings on his toes and cloth-of-gold on his broken body. He called himself sometimes the Grand Cham or Khan and sometimes Bembo the First.

  THE MAKE-WEIGHT (1921)

  Arthur Kent breathed a sigh of relief as the last trick of the last hand was turned. He had been lucky. Indeed lucky, if neither of the other two players at the green-covered table in the billiard room of the officers’ club had seen him cheat that last hand.

  Checking up the score, Kent held it out for the others to see. His dark eyes were half closed, his full, handsome face impassive. The moisture around his eyes came only from the early evening heat that enveloped Rawal Pindi, in Upper India.

  “’Fraid I’m winner, gentlemen. Sorry Captain Gerald has had enough.”

  The third man, a nervous subaltern, tried to smile as he wrote out an I.O.U. for seventy pounds. With a nod, Kent folded the sheet of paper on the table and fell to shuffling the cards together
until the subaltern had left the room.

  Into the pack of cards he deftly slipped the three discards that he had secreted. He smiled, for now there would be no proving that he had cheated. Luck usually ran his way. His was a clever mind and quick to seize advantage—consequently he had made a name as political agent. True, two years ago when native under-officials had complained of extortion, Kent had been transferred from a Bengal province to the small frontier post of Dalgai, near Rawal Pindi. But here he had married a first-rate American girl with a little money.

  “Well?” he observed.

  Captain Fred Gerald, surgeon, attached to the cavalry regiment at Dalgai—called Daktar Sahib by the natives to whom he sometimes administered aid—took a five-pound bank-note from the breast pocket of his tunic and thrust it across the table. “I’m riding up into the gorges to attend a patient.” His gray eyes hardened swiftly. “Wouldn’t you better return that—paper to the young cub, and explain that a mistake was made in the score?”

  “Eh?” Kent flushed as he grasped the other’s meaning. “Kindly explain what the devil you’re getting at?”

  The Daktar Sahib counted off on his fingers “Three cards. You palmed them, you know.”

  A curious smile played under Kent’s mustache. So he had been seen! And by the one man in the world who did not want to denounce him publicly as a card cheat. His luck was still good. He called to the one house boy who lingered near the window lattice by the table and sent him to fetch Gerald’s stick and pith helmet.

  When the two were alone Kent pocketed the promissory note.

  “What do you propose to do about it, my dear fellow,” he asked, a strained note in his full voice, “make a fuss or keep quiet?”

  Gerald took his hat and stick from the boy who had returned, dismissed the native and rose. His alert, tanned face was emotionless. No one in the border station or Rawal Pindi guessed, for instance, that the surgeon worshipped the girl who had married Kent a year ago.

  He paid her no marked attention, avoided meeting her in fact. The only one who suspected his feeling for Ethel Kent was the man who sat by the table before him—the man, in fact, whom he had just seen cheating.

  No one better than the Daktar Sahib knew the rigid code of ethics that bound the men of the army stations of India. To denounce Kent would inevitably make misery for Ethel Kent.

  The luck of the political agent still held good, you see. When Gerald started to speak, shrugged and turned away, Kent sprang up, his smile hardening. To the shifting mind of Kent it was whispered that the man who would avoid open quarrel with the husband must have an understanding with the wife.

  For a long moment gray eyes clashed with black; the cold anger of the surgeon and the gnawing fury of the political agent were on the verge of being unleashed. The heat that day had been wearing. “I shall say nothing about the cards—now—Kent,” the surgeon observed evenly, “for your wife’s sake. I warn you, though. The hill natives have an apt proverb. They say that one who digs a pit for others will find that he has made his own grave.”

  Glad that the tension was broken, Kent pocketed the cards, veiling the suspicion that flamed in his eyes at mention of his wife. “You forget, my Daktar Sahib,” he pointed out ironically, “the little thing called proof. Whatever your chums the hill beggars say, proof is required by the white man’s law when you accuse a man. I have not forgotten that.”

  Gerald’s deep eyes studied curiously the man who could make his way conqueringly in the world without thought of the rights of others. It did not occur to the straightforward mind of the surgeon that Kent’s words were aimed at him. Because it was impossible for Gerald to conceive that any man could think evil of Ethel Kent.

  “True,” he nodded. “There is, however, one court that requires no proof of evil before administering justice. And that is Providence, or the judgment of God.”

  This chimed with Kent’s inner thoughts. “Yes, may Providence or God or the devil judge between us, Captain Gerald. And may the officer of justice be whatever tool is handiest!”

  Now, by one of those minute coincidences that link together the chain of life, both men started and stepped back, although they had heard no sound—were, in fact, alone in the billiard room.

  Intent on each other they noticed only vaguely what seemed to be the dart of a snake out from the lattice of the open window upon the bare green table between them.

  But it was not a snake. It flashed back through the lattice, leaving behind it, however, a folded square of torn, yellow paper.

  On the upper side of the paper, traced in a curious, curving hand, was the name: “Kent Sahib.”

  * * * *

  “The blooming, thievin’ beggar had the chit in the cleft of a stick. Pushed it in through the lattice-work, pulled back his stick and slipped down the veranda post, out into the bush before I had a fair look at him.”

  So said Kent, irritably, as he returned from his sally out on the upper veranda of the club. Twilight, aided by a mist of rain, had enabled the fugitive messenger to penetrate the Rawal Pindi compound unnoticed.

  As the political agent deciphered the flowing Turki script on the paper, an oath came from his bearded lips.

  “A dinner invitation, and a pressing one, for tonight. Also, from the worst murderer in the Hindu Kush.” He jerked his thumb up over his shoulder at the lattice, behind which the curtain of rain concealed the outline of the giant foothills of the Himalayas.

  Sparing of speech or motion—a trick of all old service men—Gerald took the missive up from the table where Kent had tossed it contemptuously and painstakingly read it through.

  “The Kadi, Kent-Sahib, will come to the home of his unworthy servant, Jehan Khan. He will come tonight. He will be afoot, without his police. Inshallah.”

  “Sheer insolence,” growled Kent. “Inshallah—by the will of God. I’ll stay in Pindi, thank you. The Pathan, Jehan Khan, calls himself the descendant of kings, and has a nest somewhere up in the gorges that my men can’t find. I might have marked it down once, but a hill native ran full into my horse at a bend of the kud—the precipice path.”

  The political agent was not lacking in courage. When the native had accosted him, Kent had struck the fellow with his riding crop. The blow, falling on the man’s head, had knocked him down. “End over end, about a thousand feet or so,” Kent was fond of saying.

  He remembered it clearly, because there had been something peculiar about the eyes of the hill native. Kent did not know what it was, but from time to time he found himself thinking about those eyes—

  “I am going there tonight,” observed Gerald. “Fact is, I got the mate to this chit two hours ago. Only it said a woman needed my care.”

  “Then it’s a trick! No Moslem would let you look at the face of one of his wives, let alone touch her. You don’t really mean to go? You’ll have a knife in your back if you do.”

  “Better to chance that than have a musket ball, long range, in my head if I don’t. Jehan Khan invariably pays off a grudge. You see, I treated a wound of his once and said I’d do as much again.” Gerald spoke lightly, while he puzzled over the duplicate messages received by himself and Kent. It seemed to be nothing more than a bit of effrontery; but long experience had taught the surgeon that nothing the Pathans did was without a distinct purpose. “Has Jehan Khan any score against you, Kent?”

  The other shrugged and shook his head. Gerald’s lips tightened at a sudden thought. “Has the Pathan ever threatened your wife?”

  Again the hard smile came to the lips of Kent. “Ethel pretends to like the rascals that you dote on. She rides alone in the upper gorges, in spite of my warning—”

  The smouldering light of suspicion was in his eyes as he watched Gerald stride away and heard him call quickly for his horse. When the Daktar Sahib rode out the compound toward Dalgai, Kent overtook him.

  “Think I’ll go with you,” the political agent grunted, “as far as Dalgai.”

  “That would be best.”


  * * * *

  They pelted through the mud, heedless of the rain, and at the Kent bungalow in the cantonment, Gerald’s sudden fear was realized. His few visits to the bungalow veranda were treasured up in memory, but this one was to endure in his thoughts so long as he lived. Ethel Kent had disappeared.

  She had gone for her usual evening ride, the frightened native butler said. The mem-sahib had refused to take her groom. A half hour ago the police riders, sent out to seek her, had returned with the mem-sahib’s horse, found lame by the ravine of the Panjkora River.

  The Panjkora, Gerald knew, was one of Ethel’s favorite haunts. He had met her there once and warned her it opened into the brigand’s preserves.

  The river? He knew Ethel was unhappy in her marriage with Kent. But she would not—

  “Jehan Khan has carried her off,” he said to Kent, who was staring at him blankly.

  “The thieving dog! By God, he’ll know a thing or two when I’ve finished with him. I’ll take a company of my men, surround his eyrie—”

  “Won’t do, you know, Kent. You couldn’t find it without guides; the Pathans would snipe off your fellows, and, don’t you see, man, Jehan Khan holds your wife hostage?” Gerald unbuckled his belt, wrapped it around his revolver and holster and handed it to the trembling butler. “I fancy I’ll have to accept Jehan Khan’s invitation, on his own terms.”

  Kent started. He had forgotten the note.

  “He said,” Gerald summed up, “to come alone and on foot. We’ll ride our horses as far as the Panjkora trail and send ’em back by one of your men. That is, if you are coming.” He looked at the other squarely. “If you and Jehan Khan have any score to settle between you it would be better for me to go alone—”

  A low laugh in the darkness answered him. Nor did Kent see fit to discard his revolver as he spurred forward.

  At the cantonment entrance a shadow rose from the roadside and began to trot beside the two horses. The shadow was that of a tall Pathan in dripping finery, a long jezail over his shoulder. This did not surprise Gerald.